in which I think about books, information issues, and possibly even document some adventures.

So, I’m still participating in the Hack Library School Day in the Life project! It’s day 3 now.

On Wednesdays, I’m in class for most of the day. My morning class, Literacy, Readers, and Reading, is really fascinating. I’ve been thinking about my final project, which I think I’m going to do on recommendations and reviews from various sources and how readers select from them. It’s sort of an extension of something I’ve been researching for my portfolio issue paper. I’m also making a website as the final project instead of just writing a research paper, so I think it’ll be a really great experience!

Before class, I was also able to talk to some fellow UCLA SLA members about our Dodger night plans. Later in the day, I hung up a few flyers around the Information Studies building, sent out the official announcement on our department listserv, and I’ll hopefully get an email sent out tonight about setting up times to sell tickets in person as well.

This is what I had for lunch today:

This is a fine example of the $3.50 pizza that is sold on campus near where the UCLA Information Studies classes are held. After you factor in the low cost, it’s surprisingly edible. I eat this far too often.

Then, in my collection development class, we did the first round of final project presentations and had a great guest speaker who was a school librarian. I think that my presentation went fairly well, and now next week I can just relax and watch the rest! We also talked about something which I had never heard of before this week, the Public Lending Right. Apparently, in Australia, the UK, Canada, and Europe authors are compensated for library circulations of their copyrighted works. It seems to strange to me after studying the U.S. copyright system last quarter!

Also today, I’m having a lot of paranoid thoughts about my final quarter in grad school. (what if I’m picking the wrong classes? the wrong internship? will it ruin my employment chances forever?) I know that this is overly dramatic and not at all accurate, but it sneaks up on me every now and again. It could also be a side effect of the fact that I’m very possibly getting sick. Luckily, Wednesdays are also the day that I see all of my amazing friends from my cohort on campus, and that always makes everything better!

So here it is, day 2 of Hack Library School’s Student Day in the Life project. I’m really loving seeing everyone’s posts and hearing the stories. I’m also realizing that my days are really crammed and noticing that I a lot of time with email and Twitter!

Today I had two main tasks: work and my internship. On Tuesdays I work until 1:00, eat lunch, then head up to the second floor of the same building for my internship.

At work today, I talked to my supervisor about a presentation I’ll be giving at the end of the quarter about collections that I’ve been processing. We worked out a strategy for that, then I finally finished entering the contents of 18 boxes into a database and making sure everything is in folders. It was a pretty successful half day there, I think!

Then, I headed up to my internship. I’m currently a social media intern for the UCLA Undergraduate Library (called either College or Powell, depending on who you ask). We’re gearing up for some big events that require a lot of promotion that are happening during 10th week and finals week, called Stress-Busters. Just in our library, there are therapy dogs, origami, meditation sessions, and gaming! So, I strategized with my supervisor about promoting the events on social media and then started scheduling out posts and creating other content. We currently use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It’s really exciting. I’m quite fond of the content curation/management, but my favorite part is interacting with students and other users on social media, which is happening more and more as we get closer to finals. My site supervisor (who is also a UCLA MLIS alum) and I also posted our first promoted post on Facebook, so that was a fun experiment! My main project for this quarter there has been to evaluate different analytics tools, so we talked about my work on that as well. On Friday, I’ll be giving an informal presentation to a library social media group about what I’ve been doing this quarter. It was a great day, and I was so involved with creating and scheduling out posts that I forgot to leave at 5:30. I left a little bit late, which actually happens to me a lot there.

I got home, fixed some dinner, checked my email and responded to a few different things that were happening with SLA events and other issues. I scheduled an interview next week for a public library internship for next quarter. I’m definitely torn, because I would love to stay on at my current site another quarter, but we’ll see what happens! I meant to get started with some school work pretty immediately, but I ended up taking a short TV-watching break with the boyfriend instead.

Then, I practiced my Collection Development presentation for tomorrow a couple of times (it should be under 7 minutes, no problem!), got my stuff together, and here we are. I’m exhausted just thinking about my day again! I still need to finish reading Words at Work and Play, and then I can head to bed. Tomorrow is my one class day of the week; I will be in classes pretty much from 9-5. In the morning is Literacy, Readers, and Reading, and in the afternoon is Collection Development. Usually on Wednesday evenings, I reward myself with pleasure reading and watching TV shows that I’ve recorded, but we’ll see how it goes.

The day in the life of a library school student continues! After dinner, I got distracted and got very little school-related work done. I did investigate the mysterious circumstances around the gas bill being twice as high as usual (forgot to pay it last month – first time that’s ever happened), and I cleaned off the table that I usually work at (things were getting pretty out of control).

I started reading an article about open access publishing, which is always an interesting topic, for my Collection Development class while I was eating dinner. For the rest of the night, I will probably finish that and read some of Words at Work and Play by Shirley Brice Heath for my Literacy, Readers, and Reading class. Both of my classes are on Wednesday, which is nice but also means that everything has to be done at the same time.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back at work in the morning, then at my internship in the afternoon. I will also absolutely have to finish my presentation. I have all of the notes, it’s just a matter of working out the timing and practicing saying it out loud. For my final project, I’ve been doing a collection analysis of the local history collection at the Santa Monica Public Library, and it’s been really fun! Every time I go there to work on it, I come home with at least one more book.

This week, I am participating in Hack Library School’s Library Student Day in the Life project, along with a lot of other graduate students around the country. I decided to do this project because I thought it would be really interesting to see how other students’ experiences are similar to and different from mine. I’m really quite full of stress right now. It’s Week 9 of our 10 week quarter, I’m graduating in June and trying to start job-searching, and my portfolio (the culminating object of the UCLA MLIS program) is due in about six weeks. Still, I started this program because I wanted a new career that I could be passionate about, and that is exactly what I’ve found in librarianship. So, I’m excited to hear about what other aspiring information professionals are doing in their programs/lives.

Typically, I work from 9-3 on Mondays in Library Special Collections at UCLA. When I started the MLIS program, my specialization was Archival Studies. Since then, I have shifted my focus back to libraries, but I have kept my part-time processing position. I work primarily with Performing Arts special collections, and it’s really a lot of fun. Today, I was working on processing some scripts, but I ended up leaving early because I wasn’t feeling well. Before I left campus though, I had to stop at the library to pick up a book that I needed for a research project in my Literacy, Readers, and Reading class.

After I got a little bit of rest and took care of some pesky mail/bills, I got back to work. I am an officer for our UCLA Special Libraries Association chapter, and I am currently working on two different events. One is a career panel, and the other is L.A. Dodgers Night. Today I managed to get a room reserved for the career panel, finalize the Dodgers Night flyers, and write the official ticket/event announcement.

Tonight, after I make dinner (cheese ravioli, for Meatless Monday!) I hope to work on the presentation I have to give in Collection Development this Wednesday and do some reading for my Wednesday classes. Hopefully, I’ll have time to do another blog update afterwards!

I’ll be participating in the Library Student Day in the Life project by Hack Library School during the first week of March. Mostly, during that week I will be working on class projects, interning, working, and job hunting. Then, each day I’ll blog about it! I’m very excited to see what other people involved are are doing while in school. I can’t wait!

For this month’s entry into the TBR Challenge, I ran into a slight problem. I had planned to read a different book but did not have time to start and finish a new anything. However, I had gotten Cinder as a Christmas gift, started it back in December, and then set it aside. It also was recommended to me last fall by Jackie. Frankly, I was sold at “Cyborg Cinderella in New Beijing”. So, it seemed like a reasonable plan just to finish this instead of starting in on something new, even though it has not lived as long in my to-be-read pile as many others.

Cinder, our spunky protagonist, is a mechanic in New Beijing. She has the requisite wicked stepmother, plus two step sisters (one of the wicked variety and one not). Cinder is also a cyborg, much to her chagrin. Along the way, she becomes entangled with the handsome Prince Kai, a mysterious doctor, plague research, and an evil Queen from the Moon with mind control powers. Sounds great, right?

I definitely enjoyed this book. The characters are interesting, and the world is fairly complex. My only complaint is that I was left feeling like the book is mostly exposition for the rest of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles series. Cinder is such a fun character that I want to spend more time with her, so I’m nervous but intrigued about the fact that the next book in the series (Scarlet) will feature a new protagonist. However, I’m certainly willing to stick with this series to find out what happens.

The Program and Local Arrangements Co-chairs are pleased to announce that the conference program and registration are now available for the 41st Art Libraries Society of North America annual conference!

We look forward to welcoming you to Pasadena, California, April 25-29, 2013, and are excited to share the conference program, which will engage, enlighten, and educate with its sessions, workshops, tours and special events.

The conference will officially kick-off with an opening plenary on Friday at 1:45 p.m. A panel of curators, scholars and archivists will discuss Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945—1980, the unprecedented collaboration that produced nearly 70 exhibitions and 25 performances across Southern California which examined the birth of the art scene in Los Angeles and how it become a major new force in the art world.